


Unable Are the Loved to Die

by Celesma



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Guilty Castiel, Post-Episode: s10e20 Angel Heart, Vessel Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-01
Updated: 2015-05-01
Packaged: 2018-03-26 13:26:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3852523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celesma/pseuds/Celesma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At first, Castiel had stayed away. He called every week, but never to talk to Claire; only to ask after her, a series of probing questions and increasingly anxious commands that even the inexhaustibly patient sheriff tired of ("yes, Castiel, I'll make sure she eats <i>real</i> vegetables, not just french fries—and yeah, you don't have to tell <i>me</i> how important eight hours' beauty sleep is"). Claire never asked for him and he understood that; respected her feelings, even if it still hurt him, hurt to remember how she had held him in those final parting moments, and to know now that she probably didn't want to see him ever again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unable Are the Loved to Die

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be very short n' sweet, but the emotional bleedover from Angel Heart possessed me -- _HA_ \-- and it turned into something completely different. (I am _so_ not over that episode. SO NOT OVER.) Basically: we've seen much made of the fact that Jimmy is dead now thanks to Cas, but what about when Castiel was prepared to go on possessing Claire in The Rapture, forcing Jimmy to take him back? Claire's obviously gotta be traumatized by that moment, on top of losing her dad -- and I think it would make it a little tough for her to completely trust the angel despite all the strides they've made in their relationship. So I wanted to write something that addresses it.
> 
> Title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem.

The air was clean here.

That was Castiel's chief thought as he and Claire walked meditatively through the fragrant wood surrounding Jody Mills's family cabin. With the recovery of his Grace—no longer the stale _(stolen)_ thing it had once been, as incompatible with his soul as it had been his body—he had developed a deeper appreciation for natural beauty, for the music of the delicate spring breeze as it whistled through the branches of oak and elm, the springy sensation of the needles beneath their feet, the touch of the gentle sunlight on their faces. Drawing air into lungs that no longer needed it (and indeed, which he never even had a claim to in the first place), reflecting on how deprived the child had been of warmth and stability and beautiful clean spaces, Castiel could see now why Claire thought of this as a place of new beginnings, a place where she could _start over_.

Claire divided her time now with Jody and Alex between Jody's house and the old cabin, but it was clearly the cabin she loved best, and Jody was happy to take her there as often as possible, for weekend hiking and fishing trips or even just to _loaf around_ (Dean's phrase) with a book and a glass of iced tea in hand. She laughed loud and often, especially with Alex, whom had taken to her "like black on the Hills," in Jody's curious South Dakota phrasing.

At first, Castiel had stayed away. He called every week, but never to talk to Claire; only to ask after her, a series of probing questions and increasingly anxious commands that even the inexhaustibly patient sheriff tired of ("yes, Castiel, I'll make sure she eats _real_ vegetables, not just french fries—and yeah, you don't have to tell _me_ how important eight hours' beauty sleep is"). Claire never asked for him and he understood that; respected her feelings, even if it still hurt him, hurt to remember how she had held him in those final parting moments, and to know now that she probably didn't want to see him ever again.

Dean stayed away, too, but as the Mark grew worse that was a requirement for his own safety as well as everyone else's. It was Sam, surprisingly, who made the long trek to see Claire in person every other week; he always returned from these trips with a new thoughtfulness hovering around his eyes, and something like jealousy burned in the core of the angel's Grace, even as he knew it was terribly offensive that he should dare to think he was allowed to feel that way.

A month later, however, he was shocked to hear Claire praying to him.

Without even waiting for her to complete her request, he had unbound his wings and gone to her, settling onto the ground in an uncharacteristically clumsy rustle of needles and leaves.

She was sitting on a rock in an unenclosed area, apparently sunning herself in the late-afternoon light. Her arms were bare, her hair loose, and she was wearing a pastel-colored sundress that he would have had no opinion on in the past but which he instantly found lovely on her.

"Whoa," she said without getting up. "That was fast."

"Claire," he began. "Are you—"

She rose leisurely and stretched, looked at him with an unreadable expression on her face. "Hi, Castiel. I wanna take a walk."

"That's all?" He didn't mean to sound disappointed. He was _happy_ that she wasn't hurt, that she didn't seem to need him at all—

"Yeah, featherhead. With you." There was that strange species of affection and irritation in her voice, and he relaxed at the familiar, unspoken reprimand. "What, are you allergic to walking?"

When he had to stop to consider the question she rolled her eyes and flung one hand up towards the sky, in a gesture that he knew well enough by now to recognize as  _why do I bother?_ He noted that she was no longer wearing eyeliner and that she had a rosary bracelet draped around her right wrist, bracketing the tattooed pattern of stars (he decided he would wait to hear from Claire herself why she had chosen to bear that permanent design on her skin, if ever she wished to tell him). He suddenly wanted to flee when he realized the significance of the jewelry: a confirmation gift from her father. Instead, he managed to say in a tight whisper: "No."

She smiled. "Good. Let's blow this popsicle stand."

"I don't see any popsicles," he said without thinking, and she laughed. Now that he could hear it for himself—and not simply hear _of_ it from Jody—he thought it was the most beautiful sound in the world.

* * *

And that was how they had come to be walking as they were now, threading through a blanket of leaves, neither one of them moving to break the silence with uneasy conversation. Claire looked troubled, but not upset; the fierce lines of her face had softened into an expression similar to Sam's whenever he came back from visiting her. The angel wondered what sorts of things they must have discussed to bring her to that unlikely threshold, wished he could have been the one to soften those lines. If he had wanted to, he could have easily plucked her thoughts out of her head like flowers from a bouquet, but he refrained. He also refrained from walking too closely next to her, although a part of him wanted to do that and more: take her hand, clasp it tight, even if it meant his fingers would become tangled in the memento of a life he had usurped.

After about an hour, she picked up her pace and marched ahead of him. She stopped at the foot of a tall red oak, her face turned away from him, her hair shadowed.

"Castiel?" she said, and although she didn't speak again for about a minute Castiel still froze like an ambushed creature, because she was telegraphing her thoughts so loudly now that he couldn't avoid them even if he wanted to. It was something she had to have been working herself up towards—maybe even as far back as a month. Shame and guilt and disgust churned in him, a heady witch's brew. He knew the words that would come out of her mouth even before she did.

"My dad—" She turned to him. Her lip was trembling. "Did—did it hurt him? When he died? Was he scared? Were you—"

_Were you good to him?_ was the unspoken meaning, unspoken precisely because she was so terrified of what the answer might be if she asked that. Of how irrevocably her fragile and peculiar relationship with this creature would change if it was what she feared. It was something she couldn't have asked in the beginning, because then she had already decided she knew what the answer was. Decided she hated him, could close off her heart from him. But now, with things so different—

Castiel answered, as gently and honestly as was possible for him, "No, Claire. He wasn't scared, because he never felt a thing. I kept him deeply asleep during our time together."

Claire's head tipped forward in a jerky motion that could have been a nod. Her eyes filled with moisture and she blinked rapidly to clear them, but there was no suppressing the sobs that were torn from her throat. Next moment, she had sat down heavily at the foot of the tree, crossing her legs, hands clutching her knees.

"I don't believe that, Castiel," she said. He went and knelt next to her, but didn't touch her. Her hair looked too dark in the shadows and her shoulders wouldn't stop shaking.

"Why not?" he asked, still in those soft tones, so worried his voice might break her somehow. 

"Because _I_ was awake. For _all_ of it. For you, and Dad—"

Six years ago. That terrible night in the warehouse. Jimmy calling for him, cursing him, _begging_. He'd never wanted to make Jimmy beg. He'd never wanted to make Jimmy feel anything bad ever again. He didn't think his vessel would be too concerned if he borrowed Claire; he would go to his reward in Heaven, after all, while his daughter would never die or age. And Claire had been frightened _(too frightened)_  but willing—and there had been so few options anyway, so little in the way of _choice,_  when he was about to watch them all die—

Or was that just something he told himself? _I did what I had to do._ What a terrible arrangement of words. What an evil, evil lie.

"Claire," he started. Stopped. Started again. "Your father and I had an unusual relationship. But I cared about him, and he trusted me. He went home to you when he was freed because he knew I wouldn't ask for him again. None of you ever had anything to fear from me."

"I was your leverage," she said. No hatred: just a deep and terrible pain. Her eyes empty and unseeing, like she was trapped in that memory now, in that moment when her body had been animated by holy indifference.

"Oh. _No_. No, Claire," he said. He was dying with her now; his Grace was being snuffed out like a pinched candle wick. "That wasn't... I didn't mean..."

"I was awake, and you said. You _said_. You were going to take me, if he didn't take you back. If he didn't say yes again. He was like a puppet, finally cut from his strings, and in the end you had him begging to be strung up again."

"It wasn't like that. And I didn't understand—the things he was asking—"

"Didn't _understand_?" And she didn't even sound angry, not even a little bit. He _wanted_  her to be angry. To hit him and scream and spit and tell him to go to hell and she never wanted to see him again. Not _suffer_ like this. "What wasn't there to _understand_?"

"I didn't—" Castiel swallowed. There was a deep heat spreading through his throat and his chest, human agony to complement his celestial pain. Like Jimmy Novak's body was rejecting him simply by virtue of hearing the truth. Like that moment of sheer panic, when the grigori was advancing on Amelia and Claire and there wasn't anything he could do. "Claire, you were not leverage. I _never_  meant it like that. I was a fool—I was so blind—"

The memory of that voice then, piercing him like one of his brother's blades.

_No... Claire—!_

Even deep within his fugue—the lingering effects of being forced to do penance—it had hurt to hear it. Hurt to hear him in so much pain, and to know that he was going to lose him. But he was an angel of the Lord, and he knew he was judging rightly by letting him go. Claire hadn't made another sound again after saying yes, and so he'd barely given a thought for her.

He had thought Jimmy would be pleased. But he wasn't.

He was wrong about a lot of things.

_It doesn't matter. You take me, Castiel._

Jimmy's hand reaching for him. Not for Claire—for _him_. Teeth bleeding and grit all through with determination, and _angry_. His thoughts even louder than his voice— _now you listen to me you son of a bitch and you listen good—_

The light winking out of his dying eyes, even as they locked with his with unfathomable force, wouldn't let him escape. Not begging, but _demanding_.

_You take me. Just take me._

And Castiel, his own Grace made dull and implacable by a torture that was completely incomprehensible to the human mind, suddenly thrown out of his artificial serenity as he was forced to respond to that. Lost and worried and totally, utterly confused by what this tiny human (for to an angel all humans were tiny, insignificant— _precious_ ) was asking of him.

He didn't realize he was weeping until his arms were around Claire, stilling her shoulders, stilling her sobs, taking her sorrow unto himself; she turned and pressed her face into his chest and he held her, because he _grieved_ Jimmy, and Amelia, and he loved them, all of them, and he was _sorry._

He breathed in; that was her struggle, her trauma, and suddenly he wasn't surprised at all that she had found a friend in Sam. He had been lost until he met her again, lost until he had taken on her terrible burden. He breathed out. The air was still clean and good. The light beyond the shadows was bright, almost wintry; his cheeks, cold and damp. He didn't know what he was supposed to do with his tears. So he just let them fall, unchecked, onto her hair and her shoulders and the soft, soft ground. His wings had opened at his back, in full view of the entire world, all that electricity and blasphemous power made lowly and vulnerable, wrapping around her tiny body, keeping her safe.

_I'm so sorry._ He thought he heard—

_I know. I think—I could forgive you._

"I love you," he whispered into her hair. She hooked her arm around his waist, and he felt her fingers sinking into his wings, the rosary beads brushing over his feathers, tiny prayers being offered up to the enormity of his Grace, all the separate and desperate and hopeless calls for help. Calls that had not been heard, except for when he came to her while she was in the dark of bed, a girl of ten crying and lost in a nightmare—a nightmare of _him—_ and he had placed a hand softly humming with power in her hair, and waited until her cries grew silent, and all of her tears dried.

She shuddered against him just then, gasped with the new memory of it. Grew still.

"I love you too," she said, like a benediction.

And for the first time since becoming human, he felt like a new creation.

* * *

They walked back to the cabin as night approached, their steps unhurried, the stars winking into existence one by one in the sloped, purple- and orange-stained dome of the sky—submerging himself in human feelings had given him a newly human perspective on the cosmos. Claire walked as if she was moving through water, through a dream. She held her hand in his, her skin soft but her fingers tight, and the wooden beads clicked against his wrist. Once more it was not necessary for them to exchange words; the language of Grace and touch had been enough.

They reached the edge of the woods and the cabin came into view, the soft needles beneath them giving onto coarser grass. A warm yellow light—most likely the sheriff's reading lamp—shone through the curtains of the largest window. Claire blinked slowly, emerging from the depths of the dream. She lifted her wrist up and looked at her bracelet, as if seeing it for the first time.

"It was a gift," she said, and when she looked at him her eyes were clear. "From my dad. We were good Lutherans, you know."

There was the hint of a smile in there, an invitation to cast away the gravitas that their meetings always seemed to engender. "I know." Castiel nodded. "He said he wouldn't believe I was an angel unless I could recite the entire Westminster Shorter Catechism. And then I did, and he said _okay, I'm impressed, but now I think I need to hear the Larger one_ , and I was so offended that I went back to Heaven and didn't return until the next morning. He was the most frustrating human I had ever met—at least, until Dean Winchester."

For a long moment she looked at him, incredulous. Then she gave a soft huff of laughter, a smile slipping onto her lips. "My dad," she said, shaking her head. "It was 'cause he was a salesman, you know? He always had to get to know the person first. Such a doof."

Castiel hummed with agreement. "Maybe I got it from him."

"Nope. As far as doofs go, you definitely out-doof him."

"I'm sure he would agree."

She laughed again, and this time he couldn't suppress his own rumble of amusement. The silence that fell afterward seemed infused with a particular sense of companionship, comfortable and comforting. It was strange, and strangely poetic, that Jimmy should have been a bridge between them now and not an impossible, impassible stumbling block. At length Claire's smile faded and she regarded the beads solemnly.

"I prayed to you with these. One bead for every prayer. One for Dad, one for Mom, another for Gran—" She nodded, like it was unimportant, but a tremor crept into her voice. "—and, you know. So on and so forth."

Castiel knew all of it. More than her words, he had felt her longing and her pain, the counterpoint to his own guilt, his utter inability to see how he could ever make things better for her. Perhaps he might have still made an attempt, if he had not been so arrogantly consumed with stopping Raphael, but she had abruptly stopped praying on her twelfth birthday, severing the connection. It had been a hollow and empty one, and he had thought (mistakenly) that she had learned to move on now, was no longer suffering because of him, but still—it had hurt.

"The day I gave up praying... I was going to burn it. Just burn everything down and end it all. God didn't care. Angels didn't care. And the mighty _Castiel_ certainly didn't care."

He drew her towards him. "I always cared."

"So why didn't you ever come?" But she didn't pull away, and her tone was academic now, like she had seen through to the heart of him and knew—finally—that he could be trusted. Perhaps even loved. Whatever mistakes he had made, whatever hurts he had caused, she knew now that they had never come from a place of callousness. There was nothing more for her to fear.

As if to prove the point— "I came, sometimes."

"Yeah. I thought... I thought I only imagined that." Claire closed her eyes and wrapped her arms around herself, as if to try and live again in the sensation of it. "I remembered... this warmth, like sunlight, or maybe a star, humming through me—" Her voice was wistful and her fingers trailed over the inked design on her wrist, like she was reflecting on a nostalgic memory; and she looked to him as if he would confirm that she had only been dreaming after all.

Castiel nodded, against what she expected, and Claire looked stricken. "I came the night after Jimmy left with me again. I was only there to create new traps and warding boundaries, and to carve the Enochian sigils into you and your mother's ribs." Claire blinked. "To hide you from angels. You wouldn't have felt anything. But when I touched you, you flinched away—"

She flinched even as he said it, and he cursed himself. Forced himself to go on. "It became necessary to ease the fear in your mind. So I stayed with you, gave you peaceful dreams. Dreams about your father."

The look on Claire's face informed him that she most certainly remembered them.

"And—and why didn't you say anything, anyway, when I was bitching you out at the convenience store?"

"It wouldn't have helped you to tell you that. It only would have helped me."

Her grin at him was lopsided. "You're right."

"And it was hardly _bitching_ ," he reminded her. His distaste for the word must have been very apparent because her grin only grew more pronounced. "You were entitled to it. All of it. I took something from you that I can never give back. And in the end, you were still left with all the unanswered prayers, all the broken promises. It didn't make any difference, whether I came to you a few times in the night or not."

"But it did make a difference," she whispered, her eyes glittering with new tears in the hastening dusk. "Because I didn't kill myself."

"Claire—" A shudder of horror passed like an electric current through body and Grace to know how close she'd come to that—a child of _twelve_ —and how much faith and strength she must have possessed to decide to hold on anyway, just because of him. When _he_ was the one who'd destroyed everything. "I am so sorry."

"Stop saying you're sorry," she said, but there was no heat to it, and she let him press her close to him, so that no space other than the one occupied by the sound of their own heartbeats remained between them. "You sound like one of Dad's broken records. All that lame folk music. Makes me wanna hurl."

"I would prefer you didn't," he said truthfully, and she snorted. "And I, for one, thought your father had excellent taste in music."

The snort graduated into repetitions of barking laughter—manic and unattractive-sounding, but _real_ and therefore wonderful—and her shoulders rocked against his chest. Soon he was laughing too, and they stood there giggling and holding each other, and if anyone had been watching from Jody's window, they might have thought that it was Jimmy and not Castiel that now stood with the young woman in the clump of elms, taking their portion of joy as sunset faded into night, bathing them in shadows of deepest blue.

* * *

She invited him to come in once the darkness was complete and it was clear they could stay out no longer. The angel tried to rebuff her, but Claire was twice as stubborn as Jimmy had been. Which translated to very stubborn.

"Jody won't mind," she said, " _really_. And Alex goes to bed really early—yeah, for a ex-vampire chick, _ironic—_ she wouldn't even know you're here."

"I don't know," he said again, but with no clear reason anymore for why he was saying it. It was something that he had always yearned for since finding her again: to stay with her, keep her safe, a personal wish that went beyond fulfilling the promise he had made to her father. To deny that chance now that he had it seemed unutterably foolish, but he still wondered if this was something that she really wanted.

"Come _on_ ," she said, and he blinked with wonder as one of the poets' most irrepressible cliches came to life before his eyes: the smile she gave him seemed practically to brighten the darkness. "We can sit with Grumpy Cat and watch Dean's lame movie. And you can make me pancakes in the morning, as a reward for me giving you a place to crash."

He didn't know which part of this bizarre arrangement of words he needed to address first. Maybe the fact that angels didn't need to sleep, or that the last time he had attempted to cook something he had melted a vintage soup ladle and Dean had permanently barred him from the bunker kitchen. Finally he concurred: "The—uh—Grumpy Cat is indeed grumpy." And then he shook his head, and found, groping blindly within himself, the words that he really wanted:

"You don't forgive me, Claire."

Even though the light around her retreated by perceptible degrees, her smile remained beautiful. "I know that, Castiel," she said gently. "And frankly? I might not ever forgive you. But you can care about someone without forgiving them. You can love someone. And if you can say at least one of those two things for someone, then it isn't impossible." She tipped her head at him. "If, you know. You want to try."

"I do," Castiel whispered. "If it's what you want."

"It is." Claire's reply was just as soft.

The angel held out his hands to her, and she took them. Led him over the threshold.

Into a world of clean air, and new beginnings.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a strong affinity for the idea of Sam becoming more of an influence in Claire's life. I like to think that he has regular talks with Claire, and that these conversations (about being Castiel's friend, about his own vessel trauma and broken family history) help warm her up to the idea of letting Cas back into her life again. If I ever write any more about Claire, I'd like to have a piece where she and Sam are just bonding over their respective possession accounts.


End file.
